There was little guidance to show the best way to use the existing file sharing systems. There was no clear connection between policies that affect how documents are managed and how they were being applied on a day-to-day basis.

There were no examples showing how documents should be managed or help, contact points or places to share a problem or knowledge.

I recommended a governance framework containing consistent, relevant, up-to-date guidance to help people make the right decisions when creating and managing a document. It included:

They are critical to you implementing a successful governance framework. The publishing standards will support your intranet strategy, publishing model, roles and responsibilities.

All your content owners and editors need to comply with the publishing standards. Knowing this, people will access your intranet and use it more, confident in the integrity of the content and applications and aware that you ensure publishers comply with each standard.

And that can be the weakest link in your governance framework! How do you continue to provide that consistently good user experience with new publishers?

Your governance framework must cover how you manage new content owners and editors. This is the best way to sustain the baseline you have established for best practice. Without it, people will inevitably see a decline when they access your intranet. Their productivity and effectiveness risks declining and affecting their overall work performance.

There are five actions that you need to consider taking so new publishers are good publishers:

Induction training on how to use the publishing tool. This is not just about what to use it for. It includes how to use the publishing templates. It needs to covers features like global navigation bar, content owner, review and last updated dates. By explaining why this is important it helps encourage best practice.

Have good communications channels so new publishers can keep up to date with the latest news that affects them. Publishers should be able to ask other publishers for help and get answers. New publishers should feel they are fully informed about how they use the intranet.

Offer clear online guidance and best practice tips on how to publish on the intranet. Reinforce this when you contact content owners and editors e.g. email, discussion group, conference call or webinar.

Invite all new publishers to join a discussion group covering publishing topics to help develop a broader understanding. It is much easier (and cheaper) to have peer-to-peer conversations where practical tips are shared quickly with each other.

Have one set of publishing templates that you manage. Keep publishing simple and easy to encourage best practice. One publishing process will save content owners and editors’ time. It avoids the temptation to try alternative methods or create more templates.

When an intranet loses its usefulness over time, and people become disengaged and end up working around it rather than through it, I often find that the strategy and governance have been neglected.

Even a strong and appropriate strategy will founder if the governance isn’t in place to execute it.

I see governance as the foundation of a great intranet, and by ‘great’ I mean an intranet that is useful, useable, and supports the organisation’s goals and people’s needs.

I often blog about intranet governance, but my brand new book offers a lot more than I could ever drip-feed via short posts. Writing a book has helped crystallise my thinking around governance, and delve deep into my past experience as an intranet manager, and as a consultant.

Take a look at my book now – it’s called ‘Digital success or digital disaster?’ and I mean for it to be relevant to intranets, collaboration, digital workplace and mobile workspace governance, while focussing on intranets.

I’m so pleased to have it published through Intranätverk, it’s been great to work with Kristian Norling and his team. Seeing the final book on my tablet has made the months of writing all worth the effort. I’m thrilled to be able to offer you my experience, guidance, and tips and hope you’ll consider my book a toolkit to better governance and a better intranet.

Please take a look at what the book offers you and your organisation – this is a ‘business book’ that should help organisations of every size, but I also hope it’s of interest to individual practitioners and ‘lone intranet managers’. I think this book can support you.

Intranets are now at a jumping off point to become digital workplaces. In 2015 organisations are no longer just talking about ‘digital’. People are increasingly using different methods to connect whenever they need to. When they connect it is to find information, use apps, share some news or ask for help with a work problem.

In my last post I recommended you have clear business requirements, the right direction set with a strategy, support from your stakeholders, and measures agreed that can demonstrate the benefits of your approach.

Within a governance framework you need to implement publishing standards for everything people use across your digital workplace. People need to be familiar with what they access, no matter what device they use. This saves time with people not stalling while they check everything before they start using it.

This is easier said than done though! Firstly, you need to identify your business requirements for your publishing standards. Once this has been done, you can then develop what publishers need to do to implement each standard.

The difficult bit is getting your publishing standards applied to all your content and apps, whatever device someone is using to access them. But you have to do this to be consistent. Without achieving this, people may doubt what they are using because it may look different and the experience vary too much. For example:

Ownership: Every piece of content and app has an owner who can be contacted for further information. Think about how you need to show this for each device people may use.

Timeliness: Every piece of content has a review date that gives people confidence they can rely on it being accurate and current. Again, think about how this can appear for every device.

Findability: Every piece of content and app, in whatever format is needed for each device, is indexed by your search engine so it can be found quickly. Making sure it is properly tagged by your publishers will also help people find what they need more easily.

Usability: Every piece of content and app should consider mobile users first. That can be a big change of focus. More and more, people will use a smartphone or tablet to access what they need. Test your content and apps with these devices to get the user experience right.

Navigation: Every piece of content and app needs to be linked together so you can quickly move from one to the other. Menus need to work with every type of device and will need testing before implementation. You don’t want oasis of content that are disconnected from each other by a digital desert.

You will need to include in your governance framework how you can achieve this. Publishers will need to be trained on how to use the publishing tools obviously. For collaboration tools that really should be by following simple guidance because they are very easy to use.

However it must also cover what your publishing standards are, why they need to be implemented and most importantly, how that will be achieved. You need this for a common platform of knowledge and understanding across your publishing community.

Follow up the training for your publishers by educating them with simple processes to publish content, develop apps, etc., and support their publishing needs with guidance, Frequently Asked Questions, discussion groups.

I recently wrote a guest post on how you can change a chaotic intranet experience into a more consistent and better experience. I showed how a governance framework that has roles, responsibilities, and publishing standards that are implemented smartly can encourage people to use the tools and information more frequently and deeply with consistent design, features and structure.

You can read ‘Chaotic or consistent: What is your intranet experience?’ here.

Many people have asked me if I think SharePoint is ‘good’ or ‘bad’? It’s a great question to ask but it is harder to give the right answer based on my experiences with SharePoint creating strategies, leading project teams, implementing governance frameworks or just using the many features.

I have seen with each SharePoint version – 2003 to 2013 – how some new features help but other features can hinder how an organisation needs to use it….but one thing is clear, Microsoft don’t package up ‘good’ or ‘bad’ versions of SharePoint.

I believe it is how an organisation implements SharePoint that helps you feel if it is good or bad.

Here are five factors that can help you decide if SharePoint is ‘good’ or ‘bad’:

Strategy

It is important you have a strategy for your intranet or digital workplace that SharePoint can be shown will help to achieve. A strategy helps set the direction you are moving in. It helps identify key priorities you need to achieve to help your organisation. Timescales also help to manage expectations and show what is practical from what is aspirational.

You should not just have a SharePoint strategy. That can lead to you delivering technology solutions that don’t meet the aims of your organisation or cover wider aspects of cultural change. Your strategy must not be based on SharePoint: it should be wider and align with your organisation’s overall strategy and related areas e.g. IT, Comms, HR, etc. and measure the benefits.

Governance

You need to have a governance framework that underpins your strategy in the long and short term. This means having clear roles and responsibilities, linking these together into a hierarchy with publishing standards, training and processes for new content editors.

Without a governance framework people could be unclear on the purpose of each SharePoint tool e.g. MySite, TeamSite, and how is the best and most appropriate way to use them. Without a governance framework there can be chaos and a digital mess that can be very difficult to untangle and gain any benefit from for a long time.

Planning

Have a clear plan for why you need to use SharePoint, what you need to achieve, how you plan to achieve it, and when you need to complete each phase by. This helps you to see what is the best approach and prioritise the way you introduce SharePoint to people in your organisation.

If you are planning to replace many existing online tools e.g content and document management systems and/or collaborative tools it is critical that you consider the impact that actions taken in an earlier phase could have knock-on effects during a later phase (which maybe 1-2 years ahead) e.g. permissions, SharePoint Designer.

Without any plan the consequences for your organisation and people’s online experience could be disastrous. SharePoint is a very powerful tool and needs to be managed carefully!

education

You need to have a strong communication and training approach to anyone who will be touched by SharePoint whether that is your CEO, content editor or casual user or contributor.

People publishing and using SharePoint information need to appreciate that it is not all the same in its value (something I will be writing about in the future) e.g. a policy is unlikely to change frequently and be inaccurate but an opinion expressed in a discussion group may be inaccurate, incomplete, change next day.

People need to understand the differences in the information they use and behave accordingly in their judgement and actions based on how much value they place on it.

SharePoint is more than a change of technology, it can change business policies, processes and how people behave when they have a problem or want to share some helpful information.

business need

I have heard how IT have approached the business saying “we have this free tool option on top of X product that we’ve bought which we’re going to use for Y purpose”. It’s a natural reaction to test out something for free but many organisations have found it doesn’t work out the way it is planned.

Firstly, you need to make sure you have a business problem that SharePoint is a good (note I didn’t say the best) technology solution to solve. Sometimes I have seen the introduction of SharePoint create problems that didn’t exist before.

Make sure you involve people who will be affected by any changes you plan to make as early as possible who can also test these to see if they do help as you expect SharePoint to and feedback any issues to be acted upon before it is launched.

Your organisation needs to be clear on what the problems and their root causes are before considering whether technology, and if so, which solution e.g. SharePoint can best help resolve the problem.

summary

I hope this can help you to appreciate there are factors that influence why people feel SharePoint is ‘good’ or ‘bad’ apart from the technology itself. It is more likely to be how you have approached and implemented SharePoint rather than the tools and features people can use that affects your view when you think about it more deeply.

Please leave a comment with your views and contact me if I can help in any way.

In my last post I talked about the first of three approaches to rebuilding your content from your existing publishing tool in to SharePoint 2010.

For each approachit is the conflict between minimising the impact on performance of the business with the cost of extra contractors while retaining the knowledge and experience of using SharePoint 2010. There isn’t just one answer and it can be a difficult choice to get right.

Blending content editors with contractors

My second approach combines the use of your content editors with external contractors. Your contractors will have a more extensive role to play than my first approach. You hire external contractors who have the experience and skills you need to support content editors and can rebuild more complex content more easily or rebuild a large number of content pages more quickly than your content editors.

Wherever possible priority must be given to your editors rebuilding their content with support from contractors with the right expertise to help. However the option for a contractor to step in and take over is now available with this approach.

Benefits

Combining your own content editors with contractors skilled and experienced with SharePoint 2010 will still enable you to retain the knowledge and skills gained from your editors being trained on how to use SharePoint 2010. Your editors will use their knowledge of your organisation and the context in which the newly rebuilt pages are developed.

The knowledge gained during the rebuild will be retained and allow content editors to support other existing and new content editors when they are trained. This approach can also help create ‘Super Users’ who can provide support to other content editors who are trained in future.

Contractors supporting content editors and rebuilding complex and large numbers of content pages will be able to use their SharePoint 2010 expertise and knowledge.

Drawbacks

There is still a risk of disruption to normal business activities if there are many content editors to train and content to be rebuilt. The ability of editors to become ‘Super Users’ retrain other content editors is more limited as there are less editors who rebuilt content and probably not the more complex content. The balance of knowledge gained to lost is more balanced with this approach.

You will also need to have extra checks for the content rebuilt by contractors to confirm the right context has been met and it links to other related pages correctly. This can extend the length of the project.

There is the cost of the contractors to factor in and making sure you train enough content editors with the right skills so that all types of content are updated and managed correctly after you launch.

In my next post I will cover my final approach to rebuilding your content.